By IBM Instana Team 3 min read
June 10, 2022

You asked, and we’ve delivered. We’re pleased to announce IBM Instana™ Smart Alert for Application Perspectives is now available. The previous versions allowed the capability to create alerts for front-end web applications based on metrics like website speed, JavaScript issues, and HTTP status codes and geolocation, browser, OS, and more, as well as your own custom Smart Alerts.

These enhancements saw that the minimal configuration, alerting baseline and configurations provided for front-end web applications, is now extended to all applications. The new metric simplified its reporting characteristics to the industry best practice.

The new four blueprints that allow you to define your Smart Alerts within the IBM Instana platform are:

  • Slow calls
  • Erroneous calls
  • HTTP status codes
  • Unexpectedly high or low number of calls

Benefits of Smart Alerts for Application Perspectives

Have you ever wondered how to improve your MTTP with minimal configuration? Smart Alerts provides a user-friendly interface that caters to both advanced and nonadvanced members of the DevOps team.

Let’s explore some of the benefits:

  • Out-of-the-box blueprints: There has been a growing need for development teams to also set up alerting and monitoring for their services using intelligent templates without relying on specialists in their organizations like SREs. Smart Alerts makes this process a breeze for all users, while allowing advanced users to have fine control over how alerts are configured when desired.
  • Fine-granular control for advanced users: It provides the special ability to fine-tune when alert notifications are dispatched in violation of the underlying alert condition. For example, alerts can be configured to be dispatched only when a specified number of users are impacted.
  • Flexible definition of alert scope: Smart Alerts for Application Perspectives features unbounded scoping, which means there’s no limit to the ways you can set the detection scope within any alert.

How to create a Smart Alert for Application Perspectives

Pick an Application Perspective, service or endpoint:

Press the Add Smart Alert button:

Choose the blueprint:

Select or refine the scope:

Tweak the alert condition and when you want to be alerted in advance mode (optional):

Select alert channel:

Global Smart Alerts allow you to create alerts across multiple application perspectives. To do this process, click on the Smart Alerts options. A page of the current out-of-the-box alerts will be displayed, along with any new global Smart Alerts that you’ve created.

Use APIs to programmatically create alerts. As before, you can use our REST APIs to programmatically create alert configurations. This method enables you to capture alert configuration as code, and to build automation around setting up alerts.

With this update, Smart Alerts for Application Perspectives will replace our currently existing custom events and built-in events for entity types application, service and endpoint. These alert types shall be marked as deprecated within the IBM Instana UI. We’ve also built a utility to help you migrate custom events for application, service or endpoints to Smart Alerts.

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